January 01, 2006

Remember the French Riots?

It's often the nature of the blogosphere that we get all in a tizzy over some major issue of the day (Brownie & Katrina! Eurabian Intifada on the Seine! Fitzmas Came Early!) only to (overly?) quickly move on to the Next Big Thing (yes, there are some notable exceptions, like Maguire's monomaniacal coverage of l'affaire Plame, or Steve Clemon's Bolton-palooza, among others). I'm as guilty of it as the next guy, of course, but the thought occurred to me that I had never done a follow-on re: the French riots after my initial post of November last year. I recently noticed that John Vinocur (probably my favorite NYT/IHT columnist after David Brooks) does an able job of checking in on the story now a couple months down the road. He's behind the Times Select wall, of course, but here are some excerpts:

Burn, baby, burn was a cry of grief or vengeance from America's years of black rage, but it was also the incontrovertible truth of the riots that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin recently insisted to CNN were really a blander, less shameful variety of social disturbance. Death and serious injury were avoided here for the most part. Still, toting up the score, the Interior Ministry indicates something far different than this cleansed version:

Ten thousand cars destroyed and more than 200 public buildings set afire. Damages estimated by insurers at between E80 million and E150 million. More than 3,200 arrests. More than 400 rioters sentenced to prison.

And now, after a period of quiet, here's an unsettling realization for 2006. It's that entirely apart from the official New Year's precautions, the weeks since the riots have not brought the sense of a nation coming together on some kind of common ground.

Rather the opposite. It is a time of new accusations and new verbal excess. It is one of rioters playing victim, or being manipulated by ideologues into the status of history's aggrieved, without responsibilities or obligations to France.

Most obviously, it is a time when the real, linked villains behind the riots - unemployment, and a reflexive insistence by most of the political caste that a quota system for advancement won't help - get pushed out of the discussion in favor of easier polemics. Bringing affirmative action to society here or profoundly changing the stagnant French economic system have the look of ideas that threaten the entrenched left/right status quo too much to make serious headway as the essence of the debate.

Instead of what has to be remade for France to function in confidence again, the headline issues, discussed with special viciousness, have run to the historical effects of French colonialism in North Africa, black Africa and the Caribbean and whether France owes its heirs systematic repentance.

Or to the position of a few writers, now accused as "neoreactionaries," who have dared ask about the role in the country's unrest of resistance to integration among some Muslim immigrants. Or further, to a characterization, vocal on the left and among a group of showbiz and sports celebrities with distant roots in housing project misery - and murmured insistently on the anti-modernist right - that makes Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and 2007 presidential candidate, the one-size-fits-all guilty party for the troubles.

"Permanent daily lynching has become the national sport," Franz Oliver Giesbert, editor of the center-right newsweekly Le Point, wrote in its current issue. "Our society demonizes."

I can attest to much bitching and moaning and yes demonizing about the awful Sarko when I pass through France several times a year. It's almost as if, but for meanie Sarko's use of the word "racaille", all would have been swell in the Parisian banlieu (yes, it's true the usage was unfortunate, but c'mon!). This is particularly true of a segment of the population that bandy about as self-styled progressives, wishing to breeze along in some post-historical dolce vita vibe where the world appears like some big Benetton ad and all is hunky-dory but for those who who are trying to force globalization (quelle horreur!) or primitive Ango-Saxon capitalism (barbarians at the gate!) down their throats. It's all rather sad, finally, but I guess the silver lining in all this is that, with Chirac's massive diminishment (is it 1% of the population now that wants to see him run for a third term?), perhaps some serious policy-making and reform will be able to emerge from the dueling between de Villepin and Sarkozy. We'll try to do a better job of checking in, now and again, on how that particular story moves along in advance of the '07 presidentials...

Posted by Gregory at January 1, 2006 09:23 PM | TrackBack (0)